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“I’ve yet to meet a CEO who didn’t want his or her company to move faster,” wrote Ron Ricci, a Cisco executive. In this disruptive era, the companies that will survive are those that can adapt most swiftly. Rapidly exiting the Home Networking business, as Cisco did recently, couldn’t have happened if the firm had not developed a clear, transparent and collaborative decision making process according to Ricci and his Cisco colleague and co-author of The Collaboration Imperative, Carl Wiese.

Three of the biggest impediments to making major changes fast, especially in a large company like Cisco, are 1. Unclear clear goals, 2. Lack of a decision making process that is transparent to employees, and, 3. Top management not sticking to that process. By building these elements into the culture, Cisco was able to move relatively quickly to save millions. Using their collaborative process, they reduced the number of contractors from 5,000 to less than 1,000. In the winnowing process they established a more transparent, cross-functional process through which employees can reduce duplicative work by contractors by checking the scope of current projects already under contract.

Ambiguity from the top is the enemy of apt action from below

Ambiguity generates distrust, resistance and fiefdom fighting, according to Ricci and Wiese. In each step of decision making in your organization, ambiguity looms as the enemy of clarity,” suggests Ricci. Plus, “There’s a direct relationship between the agility and resilience of a team and the transparency of its decision-making process,” wrote Ricci and Weise. “When you’re open and transparent about the answers to three questions — who made the decision, who is accountable for the outcomes of the decision, and is that accountability real — people in organizations spend far less time questioning how or why a decision was made.” This approach reflects our instinctive desires, as humans, to work where we are given the opportunity to succeed, in meaningful work, where the rules are fair and visible to all employees.

What most motivates employees to work faster and better together?

Wiese and Ricci’s collaborative approach seems to align with what Steve Denning and Erika Anderson are advocating as a revolt against Michael E. Porter’s revered approach to management. Anderson characterizes Porter’s view as, “an outmoded way; a zero-sum game where winners and losers were battling each other for defined market share. It seemed applicable to me only in the most monolithic, commoditized industries. It also seemed to me to be completely tone-deaf to the human element; the fact that the more fully you can engage people’s hearts and minds in an enterprise and its success, the more likely you are to be able to create a powerfully successful organization. People and their passion don’t figure much in Porter’s view of strategy.”

Buttressing that view, Denning wrote recently, “Instead of seeing business—and strategy and business education—as a matter of figuring out how to defeat one’s known rivals and protect oneself against competition through structural barriers, if a business is to survive, it must aim to add value to customers through continuous innovation and finding new ways of delighting its customers.”

From interviewing executives at other corporations and participating in creating a more collaborative culture at Cisco, Wiese and Ricci offer some lessons:

• Agree on a common vocabulary for the company culture

For example, Cisco has 29 key performance indicators to which employees can refer to keep a conversation on track and a team focused. For example, Weise suggested that one way to clarify the goal in a conversation might be to refer to an indicator: “Would it be helpful to discuss your pipeline next?”

• Create a crystal clear and collaborative process for making changes

The agreed-upon decision making process in Cisco is to set the vision, then the strategy, then execute. Sounds self-evident, perhaps, yet citing which stage they are discussing in a meeting helps participants know who should be at the meeting, the level of the discussion and who has decision making rights at that point. As well, those who created the vision and strategy must share the metrics they used for crafting those choices. That means, when a leader announces a decision, he is also expected to describe the process used to reach the conclusion, including the trade-offs involved. Advises Ricci and Weise, “As you define the decision paths of your organization and build a common vocabulary to make those decision paths as transparent as possible, take the time to establish clear parameters. Who gets to make decisions? Are all decisions tied to funding? These are the types of questions to which everyone must know the answers.”

• Prove you trust your employees’ judgment

Provide explicit “decision making rights” at every level of the company. Once a vision and strategy are agreed upon, for example, all functional leaders have the much-prized power to implement, without interference at Cisco. That boosts their sense of project ownership, adaptive skills and esprit de corps. Such clarity in power sharing also reduces friction in conversations where an individual sidesteps the collaborative process and makes it personal. Ricci and Weise suggest, for example, to defuse the situation by asking for clarification, “Are you questioning the decision itself or who is making the decision?”

Here are some of my favorite pithy points from Ricci and Wiese:

• Who gets to make decisions in your organization is the center of gravity for accountability